Category: Thinks

Thinks 79

How citizen data led India’s covid battle: from Mint. “Through the pandemic, Indian journalists, scientists and citizens have had to battle against the Indian state for access to basic data, which is often easily available in most other parts of the world, including in resource constrained Latin American countries. With new virus variants now altering the course of both the pandemic and vaccine development, transparent data will only become ever more important in the pandemic’s second year. Will India change course at least now?”

Success beyond software and services: by Shyam Ponappa. “India dominates the world market in motorcycles. What will it take to replicate this success in other industries?”

Thomas Sowell: “The minimum wage law is very cleverly misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero – and that is what many inexperienced and low-skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer. Most economists have long recognized that minimum wage laws increase unemployment among the least skilled, least experienced, and minority workers. With a little experience, these workers are likely to be worth more. But they cannot move up the ladder if they can’t get on the ladder.”

Thinks 78

How One Digital Marketing Company Is Changing The Customer Loyalty Game: About Cheetah Digital. “So here lies the future of personalization. It can’t just be about what companies think they know. It isn’t simply based on search history or which social media posts someone liked. We are approaching a new era of marketing, where things become more of an exchange between companies and consumers. Marketers are now able to create a one-to-one contract with their customers where they know what those customers are interested in and can engage with them based on those interests, and those interests alone. It’s all about treating people as the individuals they are.”

India’s Interventionist State: by Ajay Chhiber. Part 1 and Part 2 in Business Standard. “Govt is increasingly keen to deliver even specific items like toilets, water, gas cylinders, where it can show the beneficiary immediate results. This new welfarism helps win polls but not development.”

How social networks got competitive again: by Casey Newton. “Facebook’s surprising new challengers in audio, video, photos, and text.”

Thinks 77

Self-sufficiency held India back: Prof. Arvind Panagariya on some useful economic history lessons on how we manage to handicap ourselves. “It has gone virtually unrecognised that the goal of economic self-sufficiency single handedly held the Indian economy back for nearly four decades. All else, including the licence permit raj, small scale industries (SSI) reservation and heavy presence of the public sector was either a by-product of this goal or sideshow.”

What must be done to make the most of a sweet spot India is in: by Anantha Nageswaran. “On its part, the government can do more to consolidate India’s sweet spot. It should divest itself of LIC. I don’t mean Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). That will happen. I mean the Licence, Inspection and Compliance Raj. This should be the mission and mantra of the Union, state and local governments for this decade. India will not only have fully opened up then, but also have arrived as a competitive economic force.”

There’s no such thing as self-reliance: by Mihir Sharma. “For sustained growth India needs to use foreign capital and foreign know-how to produce goods that it sells in foreign markets. What’s self-reliant in that?”

Thinks 76

When CEOs make Sales Calls: from HBR. “Top-management involvement in B2B customer relationships can pay enormous dividends for suppliers and their customers. One of our workshop participants summed up the challenge succinctly. “It’s the responsibility of account managers and their teams to manage the customer’s share of wallet,” he told us. “The role of senior management is to win the customer’s mind.””

Moral Intelligence- the remarkable trait for leaders: by Vishakha Singh. “Right and wrong taught as values remain the compass for decisions that define moral intelligence. Moral intelligence was first developed as a concept in 2005 by Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel, Ph.D. They defined moral intelligence as “the mental capacity to determine how universal human principles should be applied to our values, goals, and actions.””

Building ages in Netherlands: an amazing visualisation.

Thinks 75

Lessons from a year of Covid: by Yuval Noah Harari. “Arguments about what happened in 2020 will reverberate for many years. But people of all political camps should agree on at least three main lessons. First, we need to safeguard our digital infrastructure. It has been our salvation during this pandemic, but it could soon be the source of an even worse disaster. Second, each country should invest more in its public health system. This seems self-evident, but politicians and voters sometimes succeed in ignoring the most obvious lesson. Third, we should establish a powerful global system to monitor and prevent pandemics.”

The Power of the Wandering Mind: from WSJ. “When your mind wanders there’s a distinctive increase in a particular measure called frontal alpha power, which captures a particular type of wave coming from the frontal lobe of the brain. That’s especially interesting because the same brain waves are associated with creative thinking.”

A Few Good Books: by Morgan Housel

Thinks 74

Poverty alleviation: Why India is not able do to what China has pulled off: by TN Ninan. “What should concern India is not just its loss of economic momentum, but also the fact that it is not outpacing countries not even remotely like China in growth and development.”

The energy optimism of Austin Vernon: “I’m pretty convinced that even with business as usual carbon emissions will drop like an anvil in most developed countries over the next decade.”

An Ocean of Books: “What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book.”

Thinks 73

How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions: from HBR. “Because VCs rely on their networks to source opportunities, entrepreneurs should research who belongs to a VC’s network and try to get an introduction from someone in it…Because VCs look at more than 100 opportunities for every one they invest in, entrepreneurs should be prepared to pitch to many VCs.”

The fatal conceit of technocracy that afflicts most policymaking: by Vivek Dehejia. “Human beings will react to government policy aiming to shape their behaviour, and this reaction will often serve to negate or offset the intended aim of that policy. Government intervention in the economy is, therefore, often self-defeating, precisely because human beings are not pawns on a chess board, but react purposefully to such intervention, exactly as Smith understood almost 300 years ago.”

Mumbai’s Coastal Road

Thinks 72

‘This is the best time in history to campaign on issues you care about’: Nida Hasan, Change.org. “The tools to campaign are everywhere, and free. You can build movements, that used to take months and years, in hours and days. In this way, the internet is a great equaliser, especially for those who are underrepresented in society.”

Tracking Why Customers Churn: “A more in-depth analysis of customer churn rates can help you understand why customers chose not to renew, those customers’ characteristics, such as a specific customer industry or size, and the alternatives they chose, such as a competitor or in-house option.”

Why I Am Not Losing Hope In India: by Manish Sabharwal. “India‘s renewed reform agenda distinguishes between a recipe and a list of ingredients. Only the brave or foolish will bet against us in the next decade.”

Thinks 71

Inside Asia’s booming online learning industry: “Investors have poured billions of dollars into digital education platforms like Byju’s and Yuanfudao. But are students learning anything?”

Atanu Dey on what economists do: “Economics is “the science of human action based on deductive logic.” It is “not about the amassing of data, but rather about the verbal elucidation of universal facts (for example, wants are unlimited, means are scarce) and their logical implications.”..Economics is the study of how people and society end up choosing, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources that could have alternative uses–to produce various commodities and distribute them for consumption, now or in the future, among various persons and groups in society. Economics analyzes the costs and the benefits of improving patterns of resource use.”

Markus Academy: An online venue for economists to swap ideas.

Thinks 70

Tyler Cowen in conversation with Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. “One of the brilliant things that’s been created in crypto is this idea of a smart contract. Instead of using lawyers to write on a piece of paper a contract between people, you can essentially codify these principles in software in code and run it on a global, decentralized blockchain, which is something that Ethereum allowed us to do, this idea of a smart contract.”

The Secret Life of a Coronavirus: from NYT. “An oily, 100-nanometer-wide bubble of genes has killed more than two million people and reshaped the world. Scientists don’t quite know what to make of it.”

Mark Skousen on Carl Menger: “He and his followers  enhanced Adam Smith’s positive vision of the capitalist system. In many ways, Menger was a revolutionary discoverer of both macroeconomics (through his time structure of production) and microeconomics (subjective demand and marginal analysis).He was the first economist to get it right on both counts, micro and macro. Therefore, I conclude that Carl Menger deserves to be honored as the greatest economist who ever lived.”